Coping with Conflicts

      

A recent disagreement that I had at my work with my co-worker was about a child’s absence situation. Let’s name the child John. John has been missing school for a week and we were not about to contact the mother. Mother is taking care of 5 children and separated with the father. We finally got in touch with the Dad, he said Mom is working on the housing situation and has been leaving the children with him. He didn’t know where she is either. My co-worker suggested to call the Child Protective Services (CPS) for help as Mom is disappeared. But I strongly degree because I know this is a homeless family and they are on the right track to finding a stable home for the children and that Dad is a responsible person who I think is trustable to take care of his child. I am not sure if I am right but at this moment I do not want to call CPS to break the relationship between us and the family even though I know the purpose of CPS is to protect children, yet I don’t think this would be helpful.

            I use the 3Rs to solve this conflict by respecting her point of view by listening to her and validating the importance of ensure the child’s safety. Then I tell her that I wanted to express my point of view then we can decide what is good for the situation. My co-worker also did the reciprocal respectfulness to me when I am telling her about my concern about reporting. We both being responsive to each other. At the end, we decided to continue to call mother and call people down the emergency list to help us find mom . We also explain to them that we are worry about them and want to help them to save the slot at our school as the policies said any child miss school for a week and no respond will be terminated. Finally Mom called in in 3 days said they are still finding a house and now living in a homeless shelter. She would like her child to continue to our school but the commute from the shelter and our school is far. We then offered to help her finding school around the shelter. 

 

           

My co-worker and I were so delight to see Mom is working hard to support her family and that we are able to support them in the process. Using 3Rs is useful to solve conflict or disagreement, yet disagreement requires both mutual respect and open-mindedness to list to the different perspectives. To me, you don’t need to agree with the other point of view, yet we need to listen to the difference and try to find a common ground. In this case, both of our goal is to support the child and family’s well-being, but we have different perspectives.